What next? (Part 2)

The Sun shines

Big spoilers coming up. So if you haven’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four yet, what’s keeping you?

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In his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, author George Orwell creates this exchange between the interrogator, O’Brien, and his prisoner, Winston Smith.¹

Smith I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe — I don’t know, some spirit, some principle — that you will never overcome.

O’Brien Do you believe in God, Winston?

Smith No.

O’Brien Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?

Smith I don’t know. The spirit of Man.

O’Brien And do you consider yourself a man?

Smith Yes.

O’Brien If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone? You are outside history, you are non-existent.

Even though Nineteen Eighty-Four was published three-quarters of a century ago, this extract betrays the great fear in the heart of evil right now. That fear lies in the knowledge that certain defeat will come when the two forces of good unite against it. Two forces of good? Yes. God and man together.

That is why I believe O’Brien asks his question of Smith, “Do you believe in God?”. O’Brien knows so much about Smith’s life, including his religious practice or lack thereof, that he must have been pretty sure of the answer before he asked the question.

But there is a doubt in O’Brien’s mind. Perhaps it is the confident way that Smith is expressing himself. There is the possibility that, as Smith lay alone in the darkness, he began to listen to God. Unlikely, but you never know. Hence O’Brien’s question.

When Smith confirms his non-belief in God, O’Brien immediately reminds his prisoner how useless and alone he is. He wants him to forget all about God and to trust in, to love, Big Brother as the only protector he will ever need. And what is Winston Smith’s last thought as the novel ends? “He loved Big Brother.”

Is this how it will end for us too? To know what the world is like and be unable to do anything about it? To embrace the very tyrants who have turned this world into a hell – because there is no escaping them? There is no one else, is there?

Oh, but there is!

God is available right now to each one of us. Don’t believe me? Try this.

If it’s day time wherever you are, just look up. Even if you live in the middle of a high rise city, or are incarcerated in a prison cell, or maybe you are a patient in a hospital bed, you can still see the sky. If you’re outdoors it’s easy. If you are inside go to the nearest window and look out. If the sky is reasonably blue, there is the Sun shining on us all, saints and sinners alike. The Sun makes no distinction between any of us. It bathes everyone and everything in heavenly light and heat, people, insects, plants, rocks, etc. The Sun gives life to everything. Without the Sun the earth would quickly die.

Now think of that Sun as God. A bountiful, beneficent, generous presence that gives and gives, without asking anything in return. That is what God is like. That is love.

Big Brother knows this. The “ruler of this world” knows this. The likes of O’Brien suspects it might be true, but shuts his mind to that possibility. None of us wants to see what is staring us all in the face - as Basil Fawlty said, “the bleeding obvious”. Because once we do everything will change.

1. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (Penguin, 2013), p. 309, (emphases in original).